The second great cause of the enlarging of the moral feelings was the influence of the Greek spirit. Indeed, this broadening movement was in large measure the effect of the action of the cosmopolitan spirit of the Stoic philosophy upon the originally narrow spirit of Rome.[555] Evidences in literature of this widening of the moral horizon multiply from Terence in the second century B.C. to the age of the Antonines. The familiar sentiment of the poet, “I am a man and nothing human is alien to me,”[556] although we know nothing as to the response this evoked in the readers of Terence, may fairly be accepted as evidence that the new spirit of cosmopolitanism was already at work in Roman society. But the first clear sustained note of universalistic morality comes from Cicero in his treatise _De Officiis_,[557] to which we have already referred. The author says much about the Law of Nature and of the society and community of the human race. One should, in imitation of Hercules, even at the cost of great labor and pain, give succor and aid to every one, whoever he may be, for this is consonant with nature.[558] In destroying Corinth Rome was guilty of a great crime.[559] The human race forms a universal society, by virtue of the bond of reason and speech; therefore we are to do good to all men--but liberality should begin at home.[560] “The love of humanity,” he says, “which has its beginnings in the love of parents for their offspring, binds together first the members of the family; then, gradually reaching out beyond the domestic circle, embraces successively relatives, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens; next broadens to include allied nations; and finally comes to embrace the whole human race.”[561] Two generations later, in the reign of Nero, Seneca enjoined the same cosmopolitan morality. He declared all men to be citizens of a universal commonwealth, and inculcated the lofty sentiment, “Man should be sacred to his fellow man.” Epictetus in the same age preached a like doctrine of human fraternity, and taught that a man should regard himself not as a citizen of this or of that city, but as a citizen of the world. But it is in the _Meditations_ of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius that we find the most emphatic declaration of this Stoic doctrine of the unity of mankind and the universal reach of the moral law. As envisioned by the emperor-philosopher the whole world is a single state and all men are fellow citizens. “My city and country,” he says, “so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome, but so far as I am a man, it is the world.”[562] Again he muses: “The poet says, Dear city of Cecrops; and wilt not thou say, Dear city of Zeus?”[563] Every man, he declares, should remember that every rational being is his kinsman, and that “to care for all men is according to man’s nature;”[564] for “men exist for the sake of one another.”[565]